


You Make Your Nests on Open Waters, Hoping for Kingfishers

by sackofloveandwater



Series: The Marked [3]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Divergent, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 11:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9321827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sackofloveandwater/pseuds/sackofloveandwater
Summary: Delilah takes a rune from a pedestal in Karnaca sometime before the coup in Dunwall and The Outsider comes to see her. An examination of how I see their relationship. Some spoilers for Dishonored 2, but they're  vague and fairly canonically divergent.





	

The morning came when she pulled the rune from the pedestal, pulling it like a heart from a rib cage.

He blinked into early morning sun and looked out into the grand tree gardens of Karnaca. The arching canopies shaking themselves out of the city like green snow and Shidaerey Peak jutting out like a noble profile along the skyline of the city.

 He hoisted himself onto a low retaining wall and watched as the sun rose golden and glorious over the bright greens of the Woodlands, the city silent in the earliness of the day.

And then...

 Footsteps.

Familiar footsteps.

"Delilah," he said. He did not turn. "You called me at a marvellous time of day."

He spread his arms wide at the city skyline and Delilah snarled, continuing to walk down along pathway.

"I never called you," she told him.

Well, told was generous, spat was more accurate.

As though those words had ever grown to hurt him over the years.

"You may not realize this Delilah," he said, materializing again beside her. "But all who see me are calling me. One way or another."

She continued walking and he came up to her again, seated primly on the concrete.

"That rune in your hand was ripped rather callously from it's pedestal," he informed her, standing up on the wall, balancing evenly on the edge. "What could bring out such anger, I wonder?"

Delilah did not pause, her steel heels clicking against the cobblestones. He watched her go momentarily before snapping his fingers triumphantly.

"Ah yes," he swirled in a black cloud until he came back again behind her. "Jealousy."

She stopped and turning on the square of her boot heels.

She, thankfully, was not wearing her usual attire of roses and vines this morning.

In fact, if one were to see her one would pass her by one might mistake her as merely ordinarily extraordinary. But the effect of her turning spun her black coat like a wide cape or skirt.

Ever a constant characteristic, Delilah could not help but keep melodrama a wearisome constant in his life.  

"I have not felt jealousy for _you_ ," she said, with empty disdain, yet another sad constant when it came to their interactions.

 "Your very core is _green_ , Delilah," The Outsider laughed. All fog and wrong turns.

She turned in response, almost half sashaying and he squinted at her back. 

"If it's not jealousy I do have to wonder," he said, "what purpose would a _witch_ have for scavenging runes and pilfering shrines?"

Delilah stopped and glared at him. 

"If you _must_ know," she ground out, "I fear mutiny," he blinked slowly, like he was being offered a particularly interesting bauble to look at.  "There are some that have always sought nothing but power from me. They make these... _offerings_ in the hope to curry your favour. A childish game."

"If it is childish," The Outsider said, "then why do you worry?"

Delilah's face screwed up and she crossed her arms, staring down at the ground.

The Outsider looked at her as he would into a mirror then off, more distantly, to someplace beyond Karnaca. "Paranoia is an agent of chaos in the world you are creating."

She laughed. " _Paranoia_ is inevitable." 

He shifted his head slowly, like a crane being wound and swayed.

"There is nothing inevitable in your feelings or your actions," he said. "Time is the only constant in our lives."

She wrinkled her face deeper and The Outsider felt his teeth grind. "By The Void, Are you going to give me another lecture on _time_?"

"I will," and then he was next to her, right next to her, less than a foot from her ear. "Because despite everything, you don't seem to understand what you've _done._ "

She took a step back and pushed him away, but as her hands touched him the muscles and vessels inside them burst out until nothing but her bones were visible, white and glistening in the golden light of the dawn. Delilah screamed, stumbling back and falling to the ground as her mouth gaped in shock. She shut her eyes, waiting for the pain to come, but as she looked back there was nothing amiss, no blood, no gashes. Nothing was wrong. Her hand was whole.

Delilah stared at the back of her palm, clenching it, turning it over, examining it, every wrinkle and divot there was. And then looked back up at The Outsider, his face impassive as he passed around her.

"Clever Ms. Copperspoon," he said. " Found an old corpse and made a spell. But the world is strange," her hand began to tremble as he approached, one of her cuticles was askew, slightly more overgrown than the rest, " and The Void is not strictly a place. It is a creature of intents," she glanced up. "And you do not _belong_ in its design."

"I belong where I _choose_ ," Delilah hissed, guarding her hand as he brushed past.

He hummed.

"And The Void consumes what it wants," he considered for a moment. "It's unfortunate that it wants what you stole so badly."

"I never _stole_ anything," she said. The Outsider _glared_ at her, crouching down until their eyes met.

"How many lies are you going to tell me, Delilah?"

"You can't kill me," she said, but her voice wavered at the last syllable and The Outsider scowled, turning to look out at the gardens.  At last he found what he sought in the masses.

"That tree," he pointed to a towering thing at the centre of a park, the leaves stretching like green hands across the expanse of the walkways, the roots like great towers overtop of the city, "I saw it grow from a seed, with my own eyes over the ashes of a burnt city. A sapling in a canopy of thousands breaking apart the mortar of a kingdom on a precipice."

Delilah blinked slowly at him.

"And now," he said, bouncing to his feet, "it's here. Alone in this world, only because it was too large to cut down."

 "Are you saying," she parsed, " _I'm_ that tree?"

"No," he said. "I am."

 She stared, and The Outsider sighed.

"Buildings crumble, kingdoms are lost. Bones," he turned, "can turn to dust. Time bares down on us like a mill stone. One day we'll all be relics survived by nothing but our stories. And I? Am the oldest relic of them all."

Delilah screwed up her features, drawing her lip over her teeth as she looked down at the pavement.

"Listen to you," she chuckled. "A _mighty god_ sitting amongst his people."

He cocked his head at her. "Yes."

She whipped her head up, snarling. "I have your power ingrate! I stand an equal at your feet! Better even! A goddess willing to change this world as she sees fit!"

The Outsider laughed, snorting a little, as all his crooked teeth showed.

"I really don't understand. How can someone so clever be so naive?" he stepped closer. "You're nothing but another grain of sand, Delilah."

And then, before he could react, Delilah was on her feet and lunging for him. The Outsider didn't move as her hand clenched down his throat. And before her eyes her hand unravelled, her nails floating away into the ether, warping in and out of time as her tendons were whipped backwards by gravity and her bones fell apart, crumbling into dust as her skin became wrinkled, shrivelled, rotten in turn.

"You weren't ready to touch power," he said, her nerves wrapping themselves one after another after another around his neck, burrowing into his skin like worms.

Delilah tried to yank herself away but they only grew deeper and deeper as she struggled, the white and glistening tendrils of her tendons following their lead.

"Perhaps..." and for a moment, his eyes softened as the muscles grew, extending like the fingers they were once a part of, "you never were.".

He could _feel_ her now. How she attached to the rest of to him, physically, like an appendage, growing, snaking into him. He could always feel her before this. But now it was visceral. He could feel the wool of her coat, the itching of her elbow, the dust caking on to her wrist, he could feel them all tingling on his cheek, his temple.

"Let me go," Delilah whispered, her eyes growing wide. She could feel it now too couldn't she? But he only stared, the dark of his eyes boring into her, gutting her.

"I said let me go!" she bellowed

The Outsider's head lolled to the side and he stared down the long road they stood on. His own throat was in his fingertips, his tendons clenched, there was wool on the right edge of his arm, his arm lay in his stomach choking his throat that lay in his arm in an endless ouroboros in his own viscera. But there was _nothing_ his hands were relaxed, his body was prone, he wore cotton, there was _no hand_ laying murderous inside his viscera, choking out his life. There was _nothing_.

"Delilah, why do you believe I have the power to stop any of what happens here?"

"Because," she wavered, "because you're a god!"

For a moment, she sounded like a little child again. The little child he found sitting on a gravestone crying into a little child's coffin. A little child he decided to mark, to help on a whim, because-

Because why?

Pity?

Because he could see the trajectory of her life? How it crisscrossed its way around so many people brushing past, barrelling through as though it belonged there?

He can't remember. It was a lifetime ago.

He turned back, his eyes like the ceiling of the sky. "A god..." he laughed, it sounded like himself, "what does that change?"

And for a moment they only looked at one another.

Perhaps this time she would understand. Perhaps this time... it would make a difference.

But then her face collapsed, as though she were wounded. Like he hurt her.

"Why won't you help me?" she asked, tears drawing into her eyes. "Why are you lying? After everything... I don't..."

The Outsider sighed, collapsing into black dust and reappearing a few feet away. Delilah gasped, clutching her arm in pain as it reformed, still held tight like a vice around an imagined throat. 

"It's too late for you, " he said, and his eyes became briefly opaque, the liquid in them lost. "After everything we've been through I can't help you."

He disappeared again gaining more distance between him and Delilah and stared off into the city, his eyes clear again. The place looked too real. Too sharp in the sunlight.  He blinked and pressed the bottom of his lids.

"Don't call on me again," he said, and with that he disappeared leaving Delilah standing alone on the walkway.


End file.
